New RPG Pillars of Eternity: Silly Name, Terrific Story

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New RPG Pillars of Eternity: Silly Name, Terrific Story

Obsidian

"You can't go home again," wrote the novelist Thomas Wolfe. Well, sure you can; you just need the money for the trip and a support group to front you the moolah. The catch, of course, is that you have to pay the support group back with interest, because if you don’t, they’re liable to become home-wreckers.

So I guess what I'm finding most impressive about Obsidian Entertainment’s Pillars of Eternity, a crowdfunded old-school PC role-playing homage to a handful of Dungeons & Dragons-inspired fantasy gaming sorties popular at the turn of the century, is that it's so polished off the block—and, frankly, so much better than this developer's other recent efforts.

Obsidian has a spotty track record with me. It's known for coming up with some awesome-in-principle games, then burying that lead under a mountain of bugs. See: Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Alpha Protocol. You know exactly what I'm talking about if you got in on the ground floor with any of that stuff.

Its promise: Deliver an unabashed time machine back to a moment in PC gaming history when a handful of studios managed to couple D&D's nerdy make-believe math to a bunch of atypically adult-minded stories that in at least one instance (hello, Planescape Torment!) blew the lid off the industry's blind-drunk obsession with tedious fantasy cliché.

So far, so good. I've been playing Pillars of Eternity all week, and can say it delivers everything a Baldur's-Gate-like should, polished to the point of dazzling. Let's talk about what that means.

For starters, it's rocking your classic isometric interface, where the camera hovers well above your little troupe of adventurers angled at about 10 o'clock, allowing you to eyeball broad swathes of the scenery at once (and we're talking scenery that's drop-dead gorgeous).

It's also, watching the camera pan back and forth as characters talk during a narrative interlude, a uniquely effective way to choreograph a stage-like approach to storytelling that gets lost when the camera's stuck down at eye level in a modern 3-D game. (I am realizing this a decade and a half late.)

It's also nice not to see the puppet faces up close, where even in a game like Dragon Age: Inquisition, the goofy animation tics and quirky body language undermines the drama.

Obsidian

I'm also digging the way Eternity uses drawn art instead of bombastic cutscenes. It sounds like a budgetary thing, and maybe that's all it was, but give me beautiful hand-sketched imagery to linger over any day. And long passages of well-wrought text. Pillars of Eternity is full of words you can devour at leisure, artfully crafted by Obsidian's star stable of writers (take a bow, Chris Avellone, Josh Sawyer, and the rest).

I mean, it's not Jeff Vandermeer or China Mieville or M. John Harrison, but I think you'll agree it's a welcome step up, both thematically and syntactically, from the sort of churn you'll find tainting the tail of the sci-fi/fantasy section at bookstores.

Just remember, if any of this sounds half-interesting, it's still pretty much the opposite of games like Skyrim or The Witcher 3, where you're bounding around quasi-realistic provinces, spoon-fed nearly all of your to-dos, and mashing buttons to lay out armies of adversaries.

Pillars of Eternity is a much slower-paced, methodical, interactive story. Instead of practicing your two-handed swing, or finessing your aim with a bow, you're micromanaging a squad of toy soldiers, poring over elaborate spreadsheet-inspired panels of interlocking numbers, rifling through libraries of esoteric lore-related jargon, and obsessing over each character's actions in pause-able battles in which life or death outcomes hinge on the balance of seconds.

Love it or leave it: That's the disposition of this sort of fantasy world-building exercise. All I can tell you is that Pillars of Eternity is hitting all its marks with me so far—and as a guy who's lost all interest in the entire D&D enterprise, that's saying something.